Old Yorker

  • In the Fade

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Aus dem Nichts

    Fatih Akin (2017)

    In Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007), the films that made his name internationally, Fatih Akin’s priority appeared to be to create complex, involving characters.  Particularly in The Edge of Heaven, one of the best films of the noughties, these characters developed from an ethnically charged socio-political context.  The Cut  (2014), which put historical genocide in the foreground, was a change of direction for Akin and a misstep.  Now In the Fade takes a present-day political problem – the growth of neo-Nazism – and tries unsuccessfully to blend it with a character study, as Katja Sekerci (Diane Kruger) reacts to the death of her Kurdish husband Nuri (Numan Acar) and their five-year-old son Rocco (Rafael Santana) in a nail-bomb attack on Nuri’s business premises in central Hamburg.   The upfront political urgency seems to have impressed the 2017 Cannes Festival jury and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association:  hard otherwise to see why Diane Kruger won the Best Actress prize at Cannes and In the Fade the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.  The film’s crudeness may partly reflect a view on Akin’s part that the state of things is now so bad that nuanced drama must be sacrificed for the sake of taking a firm political stand.  But in artistic terms In the Fade represents a dismaying falling off from the films this writer-director was making a decade or so ago.

    In the Fade is divided into three ‘chapters’ – ‘The Family’, ‘Justice’ and ‘The Sea’.  (The German title translates literally as ‘from nothing’; ‘In the Fade’ is the name of a song by Queens of the Stone Age, whose lead singer, Josh Homme, wrote the score for the film.)   Signs of tension between the issue- and character-driven aspects of the material are evident from an early stage – and this isn’t an enriching tension, merely a failure to integrate the two things.  The harsh recriminations of Katja’s German mother (Karin Neuhäuser) and Turkish mother-in-law (uncredited) in the light of Nuri’s and Rocco’s deaths are perfunctory illustrations of family crisis magnified by racial prejudice.  The questions of the police detective investigating the killings (Hanning Peker) amount to a run-through of the usual suspects.  Could Nuri, a religious agnostic married to a German, have incited the anger of Islamists?  Nuri, who first met Katja when she was a student and he a drug dealer who supplied her with hashish, has served time in prison for drug offences:  could his murder be linked to his criminal past or with the ‘Turkish mafia’?  How about an Eastern European connection?  Katja, rejecting these theories scornfully, knows better:  she’s intuitively certain that ‘Nazis’ are to blame.  Fatih Akin takes a similar attitude, dismissing the other possible culprits as if they’re bogeymen invented by the authorities to deny an inconvenient truth.

    The heroine is in the process of attempting suicide – she’s slit her wrists and submerging in a bath – when her lawyer Danilo Fava (Denis Moschitto) phones to tell her, ‘You were right – it is the Nazis’.  The police have charged André and Edda Möller (Ulrich Brandoff and Hanna Hilsdorf), a young couple with neo-Nazi connections.  The quieter and businesslike elements of the ‘Justice’ section centred on the courtroom are good.  These include Ulrich Tukur’s cameo as André Möller’s father, a witness for the prosecution, and the professional neutrality of Hartmut Loth’s chief judge.  Diane Kruger too is at her most eloquent when Katja – a key witness (she saw Edda Möller with the bicycle that contained the nail bomb) as well as ‘co-plaintiff’ with the state – sits in court containing the violent emotion she’s feeling.  It’s less effective when she physically attacks Edda; weaker still are the histrionic interactions between Danilo, for the prosecution, and the defence lawyer Haberbeck.  Akin allows – perhaps encourages – Johannes Krisch to overdo Haberbeck’s nasty calculation to the extent that he comes over as politically sympathetic with the pair he’s defending:  wouldn’t the awfulness of the situation be conveyed more strongly if the Möllers’ lawyer, like the chief judge, were seen to be just doing his job?   As for the defendants, they sit pale, expressionless and almost zombified until they burst into euphoria when the court acquits them.  The chapter heading, needless to say, turns out to be ironic.

    One of the defence witnesses at the trial is Nikolas Makaris (Yannis Economides), who testifies that the Möllers were staying at his hotel in Greece at the time of the attack and produces names written in the hotel register to support his claim.  Danilo, in response, supplies YouTube evidence of Makaris’s own extreme right-wing political activities.  The chief judge, summing up why he and his colleagues haven’t found the case against the Möllers proved beyond reasonable doubt, doesn’t mention (and understandably so) Makaris’s testimony as a contributing factor.  It therefore doesn’t make much sense that, in the final part of the film, Katja drives to his coastal hotel in an attempt to get the justice that due process has denied her – not, that is, until it turns out the Möllers are hanging out  there too.  It seems that Makaris alone can offer the killers refuge:  this dramatic convenience counterproductively minimises the scale of the neo-Nazi network that Akin wants to expose.

    The film ends with Katja turning suicide bomber, blowing up herself and the Möllers.  A legend on the screen notes the several racist murders carried out in recent years in Germany by the National Socialist Underground party but doesn’t say whether or not those allegedly responsible for these crimes were tried and convicted.   If they were not found guilty and Fatih Akin means primarily to draw attention to a systemic failure of German justice, he makes a bad job of it by resorting to the upstaging melodrama of Katja’s revenge on those who destroyed her happiness.  If the real-life killers are behind bars, his film’s only insight seems to be that aggressive neo-Nazism is a bad thing.  Most of us can agree with that without needing In the Fade to show us the light.

    17 June 2018

  • The Piano

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jane Campion (1993)

    Jane Campion’s The Piano wears its art on its sleeve.   I saw this celebrated film, set in a New Zealand coastal frontier town in the mid-nineteenth century, on its original release and remember being impressed.  Ahead of seeing it a second time this month, on its twenty-fifth anniversary re-release, I could bring to mind barely a single image, let alone a single human interaction, in it:  watching The Piano again, I began to understand why.  This is an exceptionally accomplished piece of film-making, full of imaginative visual compositions in both outdoor and indoor sequences.  The New Zealand geography – sea, trees, vegetation, mud – is wonderfully photographed and lit by Stuart Dryburgh.  The physical attitudes of the heroine Ada (Holly Hunter) seated at the piano, the movement of the Victorian clothes, the contrasting tones and textures of the bodies of Ada and her lover George Baines (Harvey Keitel) during sex – all these are finely realised.  Yet Campion’s vision is so thoroughly preconceived that it prevents you from seeing anything more than she means you to see.  She limits your engagement with the film.

    The most dynamic of several scenes in which Ada’s ineffectual husband Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill) tries and fails to assert what he considers his conjugal rights takes place in woodland:  as Ada struggles to escape, Stewart grasps at her dress, thereby exposing the metal structure beneath her hoop skirt.  These struts and the tangle of branches on the woodland floor impeding her progress combine to illustrate the severe constraints on Ada’s womanly freedom.  Message received and understood.  Later on, the nearly crazed Stewart takes an axe to the index finger of his wife’s right hand, a punishment for her breaking a promise to end contact with Baines.  The maimed Ada stumbles outside and almost faints:  she seems to be clinging on to consciousness in order to achieve a visually remarkable shape as her body eventually collapses onto boggy ground.  There are many moments like this in The Piano, thought-provoking only to the extent that you think, ‘Wow:  that took a lot of technique’.

    A Scot, apparently in her early thirties, Ada is sold by her father into marriage with Stewart, a frontiersman.   She makes the long sea voyage to New Zealand with her young daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) and their possessions, most notably Ada’s relentlessly symbolic piano – her chief means of self-expression.  Ada has been mute since the age of six, although no one, including her, knows why.  She believed she could communicate without words with the man who fathered Flora; he ‘became frightened and stopped listening’, and disappeared.  Ada uses sign language and has taught it to her daughter, who acts as her interpreter.  The woman lacking a voice is a potent metaphor even if, in this case, it creates a distance between Ada and other women, as well as between her and men.  Jane Campion, who also wrote the screenplay of The Piano, treats the idea as seriously as Guillermo del Toro does shallowly in The Shape of Water.  She interweaves her feminist and colonial vs indigenous culture-clash themes resourcefully in a Christmas pageant sequence, where Maori audience members, uncomprehending and angered by what they’re seeing on the stage, interrupt a production of ‘Bluebeard’.

    For anyone who, like me, had enjoyed listening to as well as watching her in Raising Arizona and Broadcast News (both 1987), a silent Holly Hunter seemed to mean an inevitable deprivation.  There are positive and negative reasons why it turned out not to be so.   Hunter gives a display of formidable technical control.  In the brief voiceovers (Ada explains this is her ‘mind’s voice’) at the beginning and end of the film, her Scottish accent sounds a bit silly.   The ten-year-old Anna Paquin is increasingly powerful as Flora.   Both main men are excellent too, in spite of the film’s starkly contrasting attitude towards them.  George Baines, an ex-sailor turned forester, is exempt from chauvinist and colonialist criticism:  he’s what Ada desires and has adopted Maori customs, including tattooing his face.   Harvey Keitel, as emotionally needy as he’s physically imposing in the role, gives one of his most nuanced performances.  Alisdair Stewart is a desperately earnest figure of fun yet Sam Neill makes him sympathetically vulnerable, at least until Stewart and his axe do the indefensible.  The film won, among many other prizes, three Academy Awards – for Best Actress, Supporting Actress and Original Screenplay.  Why Michael Nyman’s (now famous) score wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar is a mystery.  If it wasn’t for Nyman’s beautiful music, The Piano might put you off the piano for life.  The film is still widely regarded as Jane Campion’s masterpiece.  I prefer The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and, especially, Bright Star (2009).

    15 June 2018

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